Was it because of Ashkelon no longer being in danger? Was it for a lack of funding? Maybe, for some reason, it was simply impractical to build airtight bunkers in a place full of sick, possibly contagious human beings?

No. The construction works were halted because ancient tombs were found within hospital area, making it a knot in Rabbinical knickers. An airheaded lot of religious acolytes prevented a life-saving construction project because of supersitition and dimwitted idiocy.

20 days into the war, and the great masters of stupid had indulged the terrified citizens of Ashkelon by leniently allowing construction to proceed, as a part of “Pikuach Nefesh” (life-saving exception to the Halacha code).

Gee, thanks a friggin’ bunch, you blithering twerps!

There are some times in which I truly, in all sincerity, hate religion.

Some voices (of the batshit insane variety) in Israel cry out for armageddon. All you foreigners reading here are probably not unfamiliar with such messianic tantrums, and this is also probably not an exclusively Israeli/Jewish/whatnot phenomenon.

One Shmuel Shmueli, some sort of ultra-orthodox wingnut fundamentalist, has published an ad in the Israeli daily newspaper, “Ye’diot A’haronot”, calling for a preemptive strike against Iran.

I’m going to leave aside the paranoid rantings of this poor, neglected soul, (oh, if only malign idiots such as Shmueli were neglected and ignored rather than just sad and insane) and focus on an idea I had after reading his ad.

For all you non-Israelis (erm, there’s about 6 people who read this blog and I suppose 5 of them aren’t 🙂 ), let me just point out that Shas is a Hebrew acronym for “Shomrei-Torah Sfaradim”, this means, literally, “Sefardic observers of the Torah”, or in short, the ultra-orthodox Jewish party.
I’m not a political expert, but my experience with Shas is that they are a sectarian party. They work almost entirely for the benefit of their electorate, which is, well, not a big issue unless you’re in Israel, where there’s about a dozen or so types of electorate, and if you unite a certain parasitic electorate (I’ll get to that right away), you basically give a foothold to a bunch of lazy, sanctimonious thieves in the Knesset (the Israeli parliament).
Now, now. I’m not saying that Shas doesn’t do charitable things, like try to help the poor (religious poor, anyway) and promote socialist agendas (maybe as a side-effect to, say, their insistence on using tax-payer money to sustain the multitudes of the huge families that the ultra-orthodox are mandatory to found as per the Torah),

but –

well, Shas seems to really dislike the idea of personal freedom (an fundamentalist political party with an anti-liberal agenda? Say it ain’t so!).

In many respect, they are an anti-freedom party. If Shas was the sole party in Israel, then Israeli law was indistinguishable from Senhadrin law, and that means literally a Jewish theocracy.

So far, what Shas mainly does is try to ban pornography (fuck that!), censor internet material (guess who they want in charge of reviewing the “inappropriate material”?) and ban public transportation on Saturday (something that’s actually quite widespread in Israel already).

What I found mind-numbingly ironic is that Shas’ current campaign slogan is “Yes, we can!”, just like, yep, you said it, Barack Obama’s successful slogan. It’s so cute. They think that if it got the American people to vote for a guy who isn’t an obvious hack, then the Israeli population is going to be duped into voting for the most self-serving, anti-democratic, fundamentalist party in the Jewish political spectrum, (well, maybe there’s worse, this IS Israel, after all)

Anyhow, it’s made extremely ironic due to the fact that the ultra-orthodox refuse to serve in the IDF because they must practice the Torah (oh yeah? I REALLY wanted to start this biology degree here at 18 and not at 23, you bearded sacks of shit!). These assholes pay about 4 times (!) less than I do to social security, as Yeshiva boys, to be precise. (A student, of any kind, who works, immediately has to pay social security as per the type of work he’s in, say, self-employed people like me have to pay 9.82% of our income to social security, they have to pay about a quarter of that).
Every time Shas reveals its intentions to the public, every political move, every bill proposed, every statement given, it’s always anti-democratic, anti-civil-rights, religiously bigoted and ultimately, anti-humanity. This party is actively trying to promote a world that has no freedom, and endless power to a caste of corrupt avaricious acolytes.

Okay, okay, I know this is like the third rant about Sukkot, but this has gone far enough.

I have this really, REALLY orthodox Jewish (not Hassidic, and too bad, they tend to be quieter, although more psychotic) family next door who just moved in this year. These guys have, of course, brought their huge tribe to our apartment building and of course decided to build a huge and fancy Sukkah right below our building, about 10 meters away from my bedroom window.

In short, those fucking bible-heads are having and endless, infernal racket. It’s like those damn idiots are trying to really re-live the event that never happened and actually LIVE there for 7 days, which sucks, because at least when the entire crew is in its shabby apartment, they don’t make half as much noise.

This is the third “serious crime” proceeding I had to scribe, and the second “murder case”. In the previous instances, when I encountered serious crimes in my “line of work”, I was left shocked, amazed and pensive. This time, I must say that I am not too impressed or moved at all. Blah, blah, blah, can’t speak of what actually happened, fast forward.

This was a case of murder. The people killed were simple people, the people doing the killing were simple people, and most importantly (hence the perfection of this post’s title): the motive for the killing was simple.

The truth of the matter is that a person was killed, a real young man was killed, because of words he said, expletives he uttered. A simple man produced grade-school level profanity and as a result, was simply killed by a simple person.

Newspapers in Israel enjoy making fabulous headlines at their “pointless murder” column. I’m sure they won’t call it that, but there’s not a day that goes by without some “redundant violence article” published in the paper. I’m pretty sure it’s not a local phenomenon, too.

I find myself not only unimpressed by such stories, but also completely unsurprised. People who have nothing but their pathetic and miserable street credibility wouldn’t think twice before killing a man who destroys it or even merely undermines it. Honor, as “simple killers” refer to it, is probably all they have, and reckless violence the only tool for them to keep it. Without that, they reckon, they’re as good as dead anyway.

People who have been forged in a lawless fire where there’s nothing but the width of your shoulders and the peak decibels of your voice to show your prowess in are going to be violent and probably murderously so. It is only a big astonishment to self-righteous and arrogant bourgeosies who obviously have many other alternatives to violence when confronted who find hopeless ignorants to be murderously violent.

Anyone who thinks this is a patronizing argument has obviously not spent a day in his life with poor ignorant people. When I say “ignorant”, I do not mean morally inferior or even stupid – I simply mean that a lot of people who are of very limited means are also ignorant of the fact that there’s more than one way to screw a light bulb other than shooting the technician in the foot, getting him to screw the bulb, and then shooting him in the head. Um, figuratively speaking, of course.

There’s nothing I can learn here of human evil and very little I can study about human behavior: idiots with guns (yeah, idiots with guns, if anyone’s thought of me as patronizing so far, he can credit to himself the fact that he disagreed with me referring to murderous idiots with guns who kill for the dumbest reasons and chose to disagree with me when I refer to them as ignorant) – those idiots with guns use the only means possible for them to protect their well-being and their future, the same people who might have chosen to do otherwise were they aware of plausible, working alternatives. It’d certainly efface their “idiot” title, to begin with.

The only significant thing to learn from this incident is that it’s important to remember, no matter how fat, hedonistic, in excess of knowledge and means and secured we might get, a lot of people, not too far away, are living lives that are not too different than the lives animals in the wild: meaning that like animals in the wild, they have only two rules: what they can do, and what they can’t do. (Yep, I totally stole that from Pirates of the Caribbean)

I always puzzled over what is it that Americans call “the holidays”. In Israel, it’s usually a phrase denoting the rather ghastly period at the end of September and throughout October in which an Israeli has to endure Rosh Ha’Shana, the Jewish new year, Yom Kippur, the day when you just HAVE to be sorry in, and now, last but definitely least, Sukkot.

See, it makes some sense to have a somewhat arbitrary date and base your calender on it, and commemorate in one way or another the first day in it. Of course, us Jews (speaking of those who actually buy into Jewish mythology) often sprinkle it with rituals, occult meanings and last but definitely extremely least: horrible traditional songs.

It also makes some oblique sense to have a day in which everyone in the land says “I’m sorry” and pretends to mean it simply because this day was (now definitely) arbitrarily made up by some acolyte more than 2,000 years ago.

But, as so happens in the slippery slope (read downward spiral) of the rational mind inflicted with ancient and non-amenable religion, indeed we gradually become to the most ridiculous celebration of all. Sukkot is by far a senior-ranking instance of the stupidest holidays ever to be canonized by an entire people.

The reason I’m saying all of this is because no serious archaeologist has any doubt that there was never, not even once, anything even remotely similar to the exodus event. I think the only time in history where a really large population of Jews trekked the desert areas from Palestine to Egypt was actually the other way around, when the IDF crossed the Suez canal and kicked modern, Arabian Egypt’s ass on the 6-days war.

It is, actually, far more likely that the ancient Israelites were just another bunch of desert tribesmen, and if there’s one thing that tribesmen like to do, is to make up amazing bullshit stories about their legendary past.

Sukkot is actually a still-used word in Hebrew that means “huts”. Well, not exactly huts, more like makeshift oblong yurts. Obviously, since no ancient Israelites ever built real “Sukkot” while trekking an unlikely 40-years period in the desert, no one actually ever built “the right kind of Sukkot” like the Israelites did.

This is because Exodus never really happened and it’s just a stupid, ancient myth.

As I am writing this, a Suka (singular for Sukkot) is standing erect about 15 meters away from me (I live on the first floor). I was able to witness its 30-minutes-long erection (that is the only thing I can find enviable in a Suka). It’s outlined, like most modern-Israeli-variety Sukkot, by steel or iron thin bars, nailed to each other to make a completely bare skeleton of a hut. The Suka is covered with canvas or some cheap synthetic substitute, usually adorned with Torah verses and filled with mystic artifacts with silly symbolic meanings.

A traditional, exact replica of an ancient Israeli Suka

The Sukkot are, as Christians and possibly even Muslims as well might know, a homage to the jerry-rigged huts the Israelites built in their non-existent flight from Egypt, making it quite staggeringly a nation-wide effort to build quasi-replicas of structures that never existed in the first place.

This past month is just one national insanity after another. I love my country, but sometimes I really wish I could just get out of this madhouse. The fact that millions of fellow countryman are happily conducting one stupid, inane ritual after another without even for an instance questioning or doubting it really, really gives me the creeps..

So, one of the truly most brain-numbing activities in Israel is the writing and, even more so, the reading of comments in Ynet, one of Israelies top news websites. Think of it as youtube commentors` st00pid, only 200 times st00pider.

Anyway, I commented on this article (again, Hebrew), regarding the riots in Acre, and my comment was held for moderation and was never approved.

See, it’s strange, since comments in Ynet are usually so rinsed in idiocy that it’s a mystery to me how could any person that’s so mind-bogglingly stupid can actually finish a sentence, let alone use a keyboard.

So, for some reason, they didn’t publish my comment. I was a bit harsh, I wrote that it’s fascist parliament members who promote the exile and transfer of Arab Israelies and it’s fascist Arabs who promote or defend the activities of thuggish attacks on Jews. What else would you call extreme nationalistic kooks with electoral power? Moreover, the most emphasized element of my comment was that the reason for the riots wasn’t Arab nor Jewish ethnicity – it’s just that naturally, idiots (a universal human category of people)exist on both sides of the so-called battlefield, and it’s those idiots who screw all of us over.

The point is important and in a way, should be comforting to anyone who isn’t a bigoted, hyper-nationalistic, religiously-motivated prick: the riots, the violence, the terrorism, the cruelty of the occupation – they’re not the result of the misdemeanor of the Jewish people or the Arab people per se, it’s the result of malign idiots on both sides. I guess this was simply too rough for Ynet. Amazing, since some of the comments contained phrases like “religion=drugs” and other such stupid inanities. Maybe if I formed the comment so it’d appear like all the other stupid headlines that Ynet uses which seem to enthrall the multitudes of semi-conscious drones that constitute mostly the idiots the like of which probably started the riots.